NYT demands Brave shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI firms

The New York Times and other newspaper companies sued Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser maker illegally bypasses paywalls and sells stolen news content to AI companies.

“Brave is the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere,” the NYT alleged in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Citing third-party revenue estimates, the suit claimed that “Brave has made more than $100 million by copying and reselling publishers’ work without consent or permission,” while “publishers have received nothing.”

The lawsuit said, “AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index [and use that content] to train their own AI models, or to access content they use to respond to specific user queries… or both.” The NYT lawsuit points to Brave’s website, which says the Brave Search API is “used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.”

The lawsuit accused Brave of all the major types of copyright infringement: direct infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement. The lawsuit claims Brave infringes copyrights directly by scraping articles for its search index, for its “Ask Brave” AI search feature, and for the Brave API that “serves as an illicit source of unlicensed copyrighted material, including Times journalism, to other AI companies.”

The NYT accused Brave of being “a contributory and vicarious infringer when it deliberately induces, facilitates, controls, and profits from its users’ and GenAI customers’ copying of the copyrighted content.” Finally, the lawsuit said Brave violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing technological measures the NYT and other content owners use to restrict access to their articles.

“The Brave Browser includes a default setting that, when activated, causes the browser to go behind website paywalls and provide the paywalled content to the user,” the lawsuit said. The browser “blocks advertising that would otherwise appear on The Times’s website, and instead shows its own ads, offering its users a cut of the revenue even as it deprives The Times of digital advertising revenue that helps it fund the expensive effort of producing journalism,” the lawsuit said.